Author Archives: Victoria Casal-Data

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New York-based designer Ji Lee brings humor to mainstream street ads in NYC’s subway stations by covering the actors/models in the ad with removable stickers that look like red clown noses.

“Ads are definitely more fun with clowns in them, I believe everyone wins with this, especially the advertisers, because now they will get more looks to their ads than before.”

Lee looks to create temporary marks on these temporary public images. He takes on the job of ‘enhancing’ instead of ‘subtracting’ or ‘erasing’ the original image, which is by nature, a bit different than most types of vandalism.

“I live in NYC and I walk, bicycle or ride the subway everyday. There are lots of ads everywhere, so I wondered how I can make my commute little bit more fun for me and for everyone around by simply transforming these ads that have become so ubiquitous. When I place these stickers, people often laugh and give me a ‘thumb up’. I think people enjoy them.”

This isn’t Lee’s first foray into the world of creative street art projects. He’s also the brain behind “Mysterabbit,” the adorable urban invention that brought miniature rabbit statues to the streets of cities across the world. To check out more of Lee’s work, check out his site.(via HuffPost)

New York-based artist Kim Keever creates these abstract compositions by experimenting with colorful tinted paints and water. As a former thermal engineer for NASA projects, Keever tends to veer his work towards the scientific and experimental.

The beautiful, luscious and colorful forms are produced by the mixing and mingling of various amounts of color drops into water; as part of the process, the scientist-turned-artist documents the swirling liquids in hopes that something visually stunning happens in the midst of the experiment. Keever uses an enormous 200-gallon fish tank as the setting for much of his work; it, offers plenty of space and possibility for these stunning and unpredictable reactions to emerge.

These abstract formations are similar to Kevin Cooley’s Controlled Burns, a series of images that also explores the formations and movements of organic materials; although in his case the artist experiments with smoke and fire- which primarily leaves us with more natural color palette. While filled with bright, artificial hues, Keever’s creations still evoke images of breathtaking natural phenomena and earthy material (i.e quartz gemstones, stones, precious mineral stones, ocean tides,etc). (via My Modern Met)

Charise Isis‘ Grace”, a series featuring portraits of women who are breast cancer survivors and have experienced Mastectomy Surgery, is a stunning compilation of images that simultaneously reinvents feminine beauty and inspires courage in women with similar experiences. The project’s process and presentation allows both subject and viewer to access a place of acceptance and beauty.

The photographic project is influenced by Hellenic sculpture (Greek). Its influence serves as a visual reference for the portraits; the draped cloths and the poses the women are photographed in are very indicative of the feminine portrayal in these hellenic sculptures (i.e “Venus De Milo” and “Nike of Samathrace”). According to the artist statement, the reference is also to implicate notions of the survival, adoration, beauty of old ‘artifacts’.

Furthermore, “Grace” is a continuation of the artist’s ongoing exploration of the feminine body and its perception of beauty in contemporary culture.

Nicole Andrijevic and Tanya Schultz, an Australian artist duo, Pip&Pop, collaborate to create delicious-looking installation in various galleries around the world. The constructions, intricately intalled in a gallery floor, is made out of colourful sweets mixed with glitter, beads, modelling clay, wax, polystyrene, wire, toys, sand, and other equally vibrant found objects.

This mini candy wonderland, a cartooonish looking maquette, is heavily influenced by Japanese pop culture.

“Throughout history there has been a long tradition of depicting journeys through, and in search of, imaginary lands and utopian worlds[…] the work draws on this rich history of other worlds as told through mythologies, Japanese folk tales, video games, cinema, children’s literature and ancient cosmologies.”

This beautiful series of portraits is part of Sylwana Zybura aka Madame Peripetie‘s award-winning photographic book project, Dream Sequence. The strange, but intriguing and striking aesthetic derives from Peripetie’s varied influences- from surrealism and film, to ideas of beauty and the sublime, this project covers it all.

It is hard to categorize the project; because of its extensive preparations, it extends itself to Avant- Garde fashion, performance and art photography. The most impressive thing of all here, is that the subjects were shot in-camera with minimal retouching involved during the post-production period. The body painting, prosthetics, wigs, unusual 3D make-up techniques and other props were the characteristics that made this project as special as it is.

The series was initiated in Germany and originally styled and conceptualized as a solo project. I continued the project in London, where I have worked and developed its visual nuances with a regular team who have constituted the core of the project – stylist Stella Gosteva, and make-up artist Marina Keri. In addition, I have collaborated with a variety of eminent up-and-coming designers from the leading Fashion and Art Schools in Europe. It is the involvement and donation of these unusual and beautifully crafted pieces that have crucially contributed to the creation of the final images

The book, Dream Sequence was crowd-funcded through indiegogo– and it was published earlier this year. You can purchase it here. (Via Huff Post)

David Datuna, a Georgian-born American artist, established his signature technique of laying a cascading veil of varying optical lenses over an intricate, multi-dimensional, interactive narrative. In December 2013 David Datuna became the first artist in the world to utilize Google Glass in a contemporary work of art with the piece ‘Portrait of America’- a part of his Viewpoint of Billions series.

The piece resembles an American Flag; the 12-foot ‘Portrait of America’, is made up of about 2,000 eyeglass lenses as well as 400 portraits of relevant Americans that either magnify or shrink underneath the glass.

The monumental flag, the first of 10 works in the “Viewpoint of Billions” series, is covered in Datuna’s signature style with hundreds of eyeglass lenses. Creating an experiential dialogue through a sculptural veil of optics, the artist uses different magnifications to draw the viewer to the thematic collage inside his work. The prismatic effects invite inspection, while offering a vehicle for observation, and expanding the definition of modern portraiture.

These embedded images include historical and contemporary American figures: George Washington, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. as well as Lady Gaga, Steve Jobs and Michael Jackson.

You must be wondering when and how the google glass factor comes into play here. It turns out that the premise of the piece comes alive when it is viewed with a pair of GG. It is then that the work turns into, what the artist calls, a living organism.

By working with Bricksimple, Datuna was able to construct a work that simultaneously worked as a standard tangible piece of art, to something that becomes alive digitally, through audio and visual clips presented on ‘our’ Google Glasses. By simply looking or speaking about the work, your voice and movement will trigger a series of short video clips and questions (to be answered by you) that further examine ideas of power and democracy and its relationship to the history and current state of the U.S. Ten cameras, embedded in the artwork, together with the built-in camera in the Google Glasses work to record your answers and to take your portrait. These clips of information, taken from you, will be archived as a part of the digital collage emebedded in the work. Your interaction with the artwork will also be sent out to the world via social media.

The work becomes, in a sense, a living and ever-changing archive that simultaneously works as a piece of art and a malleable and interactive biographical ‘text’ that takes shape into relevant historical (in both art history and world history) progress.

Swiss Origami artist Sipho Mabona creates a full-scale white elephant by using a single sheet of paper. By using one slice of white paper measuring 15 by 15 meters (50 by 50 feet), the skilled artist was able to craft up this grand ‘white elephant’, which stands more than 3 meters (10 feet) tall.

The project, apart from being living-proof of outstanding talent, was also treated as a performance; this live video [posted here] shows Mabona doing what he does best. As we intently watch it, we see a slow progression, a focused Mabona, and a paper-elephant slowly taking shape. “There is no limit in origami”, says Mabona.

Mabona financed the project through Indiegogo, the Internet-crowdfunding platform. He raised over $26,000 from 631 funders. In order to share with the donors, a webcam was installed where Mabona worked. The artist ran into some major challenges like figuring out how to spread a huge sheet of paper, measuring 15 meters by 15 meters (or 50 by 50 feet), in a hall, to transform the sheet of paper into the body of an elephant. There were moments during the folding process wherehe had to get the help of up to ten people to lift and fold the paper. (via My Modern Met)

Human bones, any bones, are signifiers of death, decay- in more poetic terms- the ephemerality of life.

Photographer Francois Robert uses the powerful symbolism that accompanies human bones to create ‘Stop the Violence’ – an eerie but important series of photographs that juxtaposes bones and iconic words/symbols that in some way or another have generated deaths and violence (i.e wars, rifles, handguns, 9/11, knives, the KKK,etc)

In my photographs, I use the human skeleton as the formal visual element, the subject of the image. In this manner, the skeleton is both the protagonist and antagonist (the Buddhist notion about, “the duality of man” seems apt).

For each photograph, the artists dissembles and rearranges the bones in order to reconfigure the elements to form what you see here.

I intend the images to plant the notion of restraint and charity in an effort to promote peace and tolerance.